Category Archives: bionic heart 2

Announcing “Roger Steel and the Human Element”

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The steampunk RPG

“It’s 1936 and the sun is still shining brightly on a steam-powered British Empire.

Ann Trevelyan, a naïve but headstrong 21-year-old English girl, is exiled to Kashmir from the sultry streets of Calcutta in the aftermath of a forbidden love affair. Accompanied by her technology-obsessed brother, Arthur, who has been coerced into chaperoning her, and their lifelong Welsh friends, Christina and Neville Mortimer, the four expect nothing but boredom away from the glamour of the big city.

But a chance meeting with a charismatic local results in one of the siblings being kidnapped and spirited away to a fate worse than death. Now it’s up to Ann or Arthur and the Mortimers to unite a fractious group of strangers with deadly secrets – including the legendary agent of Empire, Roger Steel – in a race against time across the roof of the world.”

That’s the introduction to the new Steampunk RPG in the works! 🙂 I told you was about to announce a new RPG and its development has officially started. Now before you ask me about any estimate release date, all I’ll tell you is “maybe this year”. I don’t want to promise anything at this stage 😉

The writer and I decided to reveal the game step by step through several blog/forums post. If you’re interested in a more detailed background, involving an alternate reality of the history, check the official forum thread: http://winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2836

Unfortunately I don’t have any artwork to show yet, since the development has just started, however we could have something towards the end of this month, so stay tuned!

Roommates game and Bionic Heart 2

At the same time, the development of other games goes forward in a surprisingly steady way! (surprisingly because you know well how many things can happen that delay the process).

For Roommates, we decided to make some kind of report for each character, introducing his/her personality during the interview. People seemed to love them, so I’m posting them again in the blog even if I already showed them on Twitter/Facebook:

Annefile Maxfile

Both Anne and Max will have big character development during the game. Max will learn to be less lazy and Anne to be less shy.

For Bionic Heart 2, I’m at about 30% of the whole game script, which is a good thing since is only the beginning of February. Crossing fingers, the game might be finished before the end of the month, even if has so many branching that will require a very accurate testing!

Below you can see a really funny video of Tom trying to evade Sarah Masters questions during one of the game “Social Boss Fight”.

That’s everything for now, have a nice weekend everybody!

Bionic Heart 2 and moving past visual novels

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Right now I’m finishing Heileen 3, but I’m also working on two sci-fi games: Bionic Heart 2 and Planet Stronghold 2. As the title suggests, both are sequels. Bionic Heart was one of my first visual novel, and if I compare the artwork and the writing of that first title with the new one, the difference is immediately noticeable:

Bh2mars

One of the first scenes of Bionic Heart 2, the shuttle to Mars

I am not hiding that the first Bionic Heart game was a very controversial game. Was one of the first western visual novels to get some attention in many japanese sites (probably the combo of the sexy android + romance did it) but also one of my worst selling games ever (beaten only by Vera Blanc!).

So why I made this sequel you might ask? Well first of all, I am indie because I have a passion for games. Even if I need to make money to live, I still have room to make some “game experiments” from time to time. Bionic Heart 2 will be one of them.

Second, because I never knew if the insuccess of the first game was because of the sci-fi theme, which typically appeals men more, or because of the game quality that, overall, wasn’t really good.

Apart for some “social boss fights” that are some kind of mini games to be fight picking sentences in the right order, the game plays like a regular visual novel, albeit with multiple point of views. I can say already that unless the game does pretty well, it will be my last visual novel ever.

And here I get to my title. I’m definitely moving past visual novels, at least in the immediate future (God only knkows what I’ll do in 5 years from now!). But don’t worry, by that I mean the “pure visual novels”, like the first two Heileen games. Dating / life sims like Always Remember Me or Spirited Heart are another thing.

Why I made that decision? Because I want to focus more on the gameplay, play mechanics, to reach a broader audience. I always liked to design gameplay, life simulations, and RPGs. While for RPGs I said I won’t release more than one a year, for dating/life sims I plan to do them more often.

Also who knows, maybe I could try my hand in future in making a classic adventure game, either first or third person view. Or do something different, but still story-based.

This of course, unless Bionic Heart 2 does really well. It should be out at the beginning of the 2013 so I’ll find that out pretty soon 🙂

Story based games with multiple point of view

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The short video above is the introduction to my upcoming game Bionic Heart 2. What does it have to do with the title? Simple, because is a visual novel game that tells a story from multiple point of views (from now I’ll abbreviate it with PoV).

For those familiar with the first title, this time you’ll be able to play not only as Luke, but also as Tom, Tanya and Tina. If you don’t know the first game, I urge you to find out about it immediately here! http://www.winterwolves.com/bionicheart.htm

Of course it’s not a new thing. Several other games, movies, comics have used this peculiar form of storytelling. I find it very interesting… at least from my PoV 😉

I had this idea this Spring, when I was playing the game Heavy Rain, which uses this system too. And I thought it would work pretty well for the sequel of one of my early “cult” visual novels, Bionic Heart. Is fun how some games, despite selling much less than other games, can still be popular and have a following of “true fans”. The first game definitely had many true fans!

Back to the topic, I find telling the story from multiple point of view very interesting. Because you can play as different characters and see the events and the various situations from their perspective, which is an interesting thing. Even in real life, how many times you wondered how it would be to be in someone else’s shoes?

From the gameplay point of view, this is also interesting because decisions made with each of the four playable characters will have an impact on the game world and on the story. This really intrigues me, and since you always play in first person (even if you control a different character every time) it doesn’t ruin the immersion.

A step forward could be having the option of choose which character to control in several situations. This is partly what I did on Planet Stronghold with the quests and the skills usage, but of course it was in a very smaller scale (also it was a RPG, so was only during short scenes).

Definitely making a game like that will result in a refreshing and interesting experience for the player, in particular for a game with several mysteries/secrets to unveil (like Bionic Heart 2!) but the effort in writing/planning it must not be underestimated, because is easy to make mistakes like plot holes or wrong chronological order of events.

Inspiration is everywhere

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Being indie is a creative job (obviously) assuming you’re trying to make your own games and not cloning others 🙂

The last weeks finishing Loren Amazon Princess have been quite stressful, and it’s fun because in theory there wasn’t any deadline set in stone except for the one self-imposed by me – but I always do that 🙂

Anyway, it was stressing! So while I’m working on the expansion, I decided to take it easier and work only half day on that, and in the other half day do more creative tasks like writing the storyboard of the new scenes for the other games, or “monkey” tasks like creating the icons, banners, preparing the HTML pages of the future games.

This is something I always do, even if the game in question will be out maybe next year – in the moments where I am too tired to code or write I do such tasks that still needs to be done anyway, but require no brain work. So when the time comes, I have them done already.

Also, last week I went to IKEA shopping with my girlfriend and curiously, I got the inspiration for Bionic Heart 2 main menu image! I know, inspiration is really bizarre and comes when you less expect it.

You might wonder “what the frak” IKEA has to do with the sequel of my sci-fi horror/romance game Bionic Heart? Nothing, but there was an image that inspired me, the one in the SOLMYRA picture, which you can see below, and on the right the sketch made by the artist for the main menu image following my indications:

Ssht

of course, the copyright of the left image belongs to IKEA and the artist who made that image, Deborah Azzopardi. On the right you see my vision – the beautiful and deadly Tanya who seems to say “silence”, with her robotic finger covered in blood (once the image is finalized and colored, it will be more evident!).

Speaking of Bionic Heart 2, I’m getting the various characters remade with the new art style. I made an interesting comparison of the old vs new version of the same character, except for Luke since he never appeared on the first game:

Newluke Oldvsnewtanya Newvsoldhelen Oldvsnewtom Oldvsnewtina

I particularly like the new Helen and Tina, but to be honest I like all the new versions of the old characters 🙂 Maybe the only one that looks worse, or at least different, is Tom. But he’ll have a very different role in this sequel!

On the other games front, I made progresses on Queen Of Thieves, Heileen 3, Roommates and Nicole. For this last one I’m probably going to rework the plot adding more scenes and also more characters, since is a mystery otome game and I want to add more variety and red herrings to the story 😉

About RPGs, beside Loren’s expansion, I’m getting lots of art done for Planet Stronghold 2 and starting to think how to implement the famous steampunk / horror rpg I’ve been talking about lately on Twitter…